Chapter 7 7. Beauty and beauty

What is beauty?In Nietzsche's understanding, in addition to the above-mentioned "illusion of appearance" and "projection of the abundance of vitality on the object", there are the following notable formulations: First, beauty is the self-affirmation of human beings, and there is no "beauty at ease". "Beauty in itself is a mere phrase, never a concept. In beauty man sets himself up as the measure of perfection; in beauty he adores himself on select occasions. A species cannot affirm itself without it... ...man believes that the world itself is full of beauty,—he forgets that he is the cause of beauty... After all, man reflects himself in things, and he considers beautiful everything that reflects his image: the judgment of beauty is his Ethnic vanity... Man humanizes the world, that’s all.” Man is not only the only aesthetic subject, but in the final analysis the only aesthetic object. "Nothing is beautiful but man; upon this simple truth all aesthetics is founded, and it is the first truth of aesthetics. We immediately add the second truth of aesthetics: nothing is uglier than a decayed man ,—the field of aesthetic judgment is thus limited.”

Second, beauty is the root of strong desire.According to Nietzsche, all aesthetic theory since Kant has been corrupted by the notion of disinterestedness.He disliked the so-called "desireless contemplation" and advocated: "Where is the beauty? Where I must will with all my will; where I am willing to love and die so that the image does not remain just an image. Love and death: always the same ... the will to love: this is also the willingness to die." Third, beauty is the manifestation of powerful images. "When the might becomes merciful and descends into the visible, I call this descent beautiful."

Nietzsche mainly has the following analysis on aesthetic psychology: First, Lenovo said.Judgments of beauty "endow upon the object which excites it a magic power which is conditioned on the associations between the judgments of beauty and which has nothing to do with the nature of that object." An object is felt as beautiful because of this The object activates the subject's unconscious memories of all kinds of good experiences in the past, and all these experiences motivate each other and gather around this object.Aesthetic perception, therefore, is an illusion based on unconscious associations.

Second, animal sexual pleasure is mixed.There are animal states of pleasure in us, such as sexuality, drunkenness, cruelty, etc. When an object excites the region in which these states of pleasure reside, "the mixture of these extremely delicate nuances of animal pleasure and desire is the aesthetic state." Third, empathy.In ancient times, people were trained by fear and saw danger in all strangers, so they learned the ability to quickly comprehend and imitate the other person's feelings in their hearts, that is, they learned to empathize.People even extended this view from humans and animals to natural things, thinking that all movements and lines contain intentions.Empathy is practiced out of fear, and out of empathy comes beauty of all kinds, including that of nature.This statement is equivalent to the theory of empathy, but Nietzsche pointed out that empathy originated from the fear of primitive people.

Fourth, the distance said.Beauty depends on a certain distance in space or time.